Our Manifestos

Last weekend I sat down to watch the Champions League Final between Real Madrid and Juventus. Historically, this has been a prime example of ‘Event TV’; a huge must-watch sporting occasion – shown live on broadcast networks. A genre that traditional broadcasters have held up as a final unassailable bastion against the efforts of Silicon Valley to take over the living room. However, no longer it seems.

After scrolling around and finding that only BT was showing the game, the familiar complexities of navigating today’s TV landscape began. Although a BT customer, I didn’t have access to the right package but I noticed its coverage was live and free on YouTube. With multiple remotes in hand I switched from Freeview via a Humax box to the TV apps on my Sony TV. I then launched YouTube and fiddled with the sound settings and there it was: full-screen UCL action.

Now while far from being a slick user-experience this felt like a moment when the tech titans had finally breached the last defences of traditional broadcasting. It’s been a long time coming with Google launching its first salvoes at the traditional broadcasters almost ten years ago before launching into its ownhardware venture with Sony. Since then, there have been...

In our Digital Strategy Sessions there is often a moment when the executive teams realise that digital marketing and media doesn’t come with a rate card that can be negotiated over a good lunch in Soho.

Nowhere is this more true than when reviewing the programmatic auctions that drive modern digital media markets. For executives used to well-thumbed pricing manuals for TV spots, out-of-home billboards or double-page spreads, this new environment can be disorientating.

Traditional media formats benefit from a baked-in sense of value and price. This may be down to an established econometric model, a long-held benchmark, a missive from the procurement department or simply the deal done by the media agency at an away day. Just like the company furniture, executives are comfortable with price and value. In contrast, when entering an auction-driven modern media market, the lack of historical payments to lean back on can be discomforting.

One of the disconcerting aspects of attending an auction – offline or online - for the first time is not having a definitive price for the items you want to buy. The cost is determined by your budget and the value of the auction lot in your own context.

To draw upon a simple example from my family history, long before the digital world, a much-loved uncle of mine...

The media and marketing industry has long been guilty of beating consumers (aka people) over the head with commercial brand messages until they pay attention. This mass marketing approach is crudely military with big brands seeking maximium reach and frequency by launching campaigns that seek to cut-through and penetrate. However, modern networked media has put the power back in the hands of individuals who are simply able to turn off, fast-forward, filter out and unsubscribe from irritating ads. This has left brands in a quandary about how to reach consumers and build that illusive equity that encourages shareholders to keep investing their shekels. However, whilst mass marketing results in the majority of folk covering their ears, the new alternative may leave them looking over their shoulders. This is because big brands are increasingly focusing on mass-snooping exercises to gather data about individuals in the hope of identifying likely customers. Clearly, the collection of information about people isn't new. The direct marketing industry has been with us...

Like many independent web workers, I sometimes find it tricky when people ask me what I do professionally. The day-to-day reality is that I research and analyse digital trends that I think are interesting and help like-minded clients work out if and how they are relevant. However, people don't always find that helpful. So sometimes I say that I work with marketeers and brands that feel overwhelmed by technology. Which, I suspect, can sound patronising. But it shouldn't. Feeling overwhelmed is a perfectly understandable reaction as, rather like the rain in the UK at the moment, technological change can seem unrelenting, which for many people is disturbing. I recall a session I ran earlier this year when an executive told me she was worried that the pace of digital change was eventually going to make her redundant. Not because her job was going to disappear but, despite being a smart, accomplished individual she felt she didn't have the time to keep up with the latest bits and bytes. Once again, this is understandable and the individual in question is certainly...

The other day I was chatting to a Digital Grand Fromage (they exist now) in one of the bigfouradnetworks who told me that one problem with today's brand marketers (aka clients) is they don’t like data. Huh? Don’t like data? How can this be I thought? The marketing industry is utterly obsessed with the stuff; be it GRPs, TRPs, OTS, RPC or the myriad of consumer segmentation schemes, such as TGI. Or the insights garnered from quantitative or qualitative market research about, for instance, awareness and recall. Surely, the marketing business is awash with metrics and measurement. In fact, I think what this highly-esteemed DGF was talking about was a fear of the type of data produced on the web, by machines, apps, devices and other web wizadry. Not ‘proper’ media and marketing information like BARB. At a superficial level this fear of online data is the understandable anxiety felt by brand marketers who, when trying to invest their media megabucks, are interrupted by someone suggesting the use of a webby analytics package. A kind of ‘dashboard-itis'. Such dashboards promise to offer huge amounts of business-critical, C-Suite-level insights into ROI delivery. In reality, they make people want to rush into a dark room and apply wet flannelling to their throbbing brows. Indeed, ongoing exposure to...

Over the past few years, I've designed and delivered a fair number (two hundred-ish) of what I now, slightly grandiosely, call Digital Strategy Sessions. These are for clients who want to get to grips with some aspect of digital and networked media and how they, their company, brand or organisation are affected. The background to these sessions is, as you’d imagine, varied ranging from: a need to react to a competitor’s online advantage; an unforeseen event; input for planning; context for a tricky issue; cultural change; thirst for new ideas; chairman’s missive; personal missions or just to kick around some new plans. However, one constant is that the people who attend the sessions range from the wildly enthusiastic to the deeply sceptical - and occasionally cynical. I recently ran a session where the feedback was simply – ‘more please,’ and, clearly, I work hard to encourage such sensible and insightful reactions! However, I have learnt to pay a lot of attention to the less glowing commentary too, much of which comes in the moment, rather than on feedback forms that may be read later by management. For example, last year, I was five minutes into a full-day session when one of the participants, told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was ‘wrong’ and...

Last week I was chatting to a Grand Fromage in private equity and he asked me what I do. I explained that my professional role is helping companies with challenges, in all their guises, arising from the ongoing march of networked media. The GF in question said he found the area exciting and clearly had a sophisticated view so his next questions were very interesting. He asked, 'when will it end?', and will there be a, ‘Y2K moment’? By which I think he meant will all this techy stuff just stop and leave us sitting around wondering why on earth we’d spent half of our lives typing updates into Twitter. I know exactly what he means. I frequently find myself wondering if technology has, finally, hit some plateau and that everything will just calm down a bit; whether Silicon Valley will lay off the macchiatos for a while so we can all take a breath. These questions may be down to the basic human desire for a stable, predictable world. As they say, no one really likes change. But change, it would appear, is what we've got. Furthermore, the type of change that can seemingly arrive from nowhere. Strange new digital gubbins build up a head-of-steam under the radar and then evidently pop-up fully-formed, driving people into odd new Alice-In-Wonderland behaviours. For example, normal folk become determined to be ‘Mayor’ of their local coffee shop. But not really - only virtually! Others start having conversations with, rather than on, their phones. Or, more fundamentally, strange...

It can be quite hard to be clear about the effect social media has had on brands and the broader marketing landscape. Some people would have you believe that the online global conversation that social media has unleashed is a revolution that brands simply have to be involved in if they are to stay relevant. Others say it's only really significant within specific, albeit important, areas of marketing such as customer service. Either way, there can be no doubt that social media in its many guises has changed people's habits and expectations and therefore it remains an area of ongoing fascination for brands who pride themselves on being close to their consumers and the marketplace. However, for such brands to join the conversation in a credible way...

John Lewis, the UK department store chain, has created a very cute Christmas TV ad that continues its tactic of playing on people's heart strings to rise above the yuletide shopping onslaught. My attention was drawn to the commercial by a Telegraph journalist I follow on Twitter who added that even his hardened hack colleagues had been moved to tears. How could I not take a peek? So over I went to YouTube to watch the ad (two hundred and fifty thousand views and climbing) and to see if I could pass the dry lacriminal test. (I couldn’t, no one can). @hwallop also noted that the first showing of the ad would be on the following Saturday night during X-Factor, and indeed I glimpsed it for a nanosecond as I steamed through one of the show’s giant ad breaks at 60x normal speed. Now I recognise that my own media consumption habits aren’t a perfect microcosm for the country at large. Not everyone will be guided by Twitter to the degree that I am. However, I am a John Lewis customer (who isn’t?) and I suspect that as Web TV grows in the UK, my own experience of the ad will become more normal, not less. Web TV I hear you cry!? But YouTube isn’t Web TV. It’s YouTube - where dogs skateboard and babies giggle. Well not anymore it isn't. Sharp-eyed VC Mark Suster spotted that...

‘Big Data’ is the phrase of the moment intechcircles which probably means it will be appearing on the to-do lists of marketing folk soon. The expression refers mainly to the oceans of information being poured continuously onto the open web and social networks by ever more connected consumers (aka people). This tsunami comes in the shape of comments, images, scans, tweets, likes, views, posts, videos and a kaleidoscope of other digital expressions. However, whilst people's everyday lives are providing a big piece of the pie, the scope of Big Data goes much further. Less obvious but just as vast are the intelligence flows that stem from our web browsing behaviour or location signals from smartphones. Other component parts include corporations publishing market information , governments opening up public data for others to use, or vast social platforms that encourage smart developers to weave new applications and services. The result is a share-and-compare economy where people, companies and organisations trade digital views, opinions and information in order to help make decisions - commercial or otherwise. As ever, this creates challenges and opportunities for marketing and brand folk. But there’s no shortage...